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Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

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Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#201

Post by dmantis »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #152
krageon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole "this costs too much power!" movement is disingenuous, it generally relies upon comparisons to Visa or similar networks. These networks are built upon the suffering of millions (which you can I suppose equate to rampant CO2 production, if you really wanted to) and should not be used at all. Any alternative is better than that. Then of course there is the whole notion that using a lot of power is in and of i…

Serious question: Who suffers at the hands of Mastercard?

Well, not directly the mastercard, but current banking system - lots of people.

TLDR; custody banking model keeps people out of control of their own property.

There is a big problem with private property rights and safety guaranties of your capital today in most of the world. There are three problems: unstable govs in 3rd world countries, capital moving restrictions and QEs.

I'm, for example, not from developed country, so I have several restrictions on my own money, some of which may be applied to US/Europe citizens and some may not:

  1) my gov, speaking softly, is not stable. I have no guarantee on my bank accounts in the long term (eg 20+ years). I can assume that funds can be at least inflated in several times, if not withdrawn in the name of some "patriotic" gov initiative. It would be much better to have my funds away from such jurisdiction. It's safer to have the funds out of **any** jurisdiction due to some political conflicts and attacks. US and their banks are likely to freeze Russian/China/Iran citizens funds as well when another conflict will arise. 

  2) Capital moving. Even if someone assume that some jurisdiction is safe - there is another problem - not any country makes capital flowing outside its border legal. You just **can't** move your **own** funds somewhere where you see it fit the most. Domestic banks may be completely controlled by the gov and too much cash can be easily arrested on its way by customs. 
  
  3) QEs, which is my favorite part and applied to any human on the earth today. Your money is used to "save" someone without your direct permission even if you live in good country, paid your taxes and did nothing wrong. Just by printing more money - practically making your hard-earned money cheaper and less useful. They'd say that you can move your money to stocks (US, by the way, there is no stable stocks but theirs), but you both will need to pay tax from your so called profits (the hell, on SP500 I won't even earn on the long run, I barely save initial funds considering inflation!) and forced to invest in american economy, which not everyone (surprise!) want to do. And stocks can fail badly.
With some assumptions, crypto solves all three problems very efficiently.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#202

Post by westwing »

elcomet wrote: post #162
intotheabyss wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it took little to no effort to get gold, then it wouldn't be valuable. The only reason something like gold is valuable is because it's scarce, and it's scarce because it requires a lot of work to extract. Am I missing something here?

Yeah, you are partly right. Prices depend on supply and demand. Gold is scarce, thus supply is low, and is useful (beautiful, can conduct electricity), thus demand is high. Bitcoin is scarce, yeah, as it requires a lot of energy to produce it. But it's not really useful for now, people buy it only for speculation. So demand exists, but it might fluctuate a lot.

I would argue that gold also derives most of its value from speculation, not its physical properties. There are metals with even more favorable properties that are even scarcer, yet they are valued less.

Platinum for instance was at one point considered the level "above gold", but it has since been overtaken. Gold simply is the better brand. It's the same for Bitcoin versus all other digital currencies.

> But it's not really useful for now, people buy it only for speculation.

Speculation itself is useful. Bypassing the financial system is useful.

A price of $18,000 per unit of Bitcoin might sound ridiculous, but it needs to be considered that the market cap of Bitcoin, representing most of the world's cryptocurrency market, is only $200 billion. That is comparable to the assets of a medium-sized US bank.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#203

Post by CryptoPunk »

nwah1 wrote: post #190
dgrin91 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means orders of magnitude less. The part of the blockchain that proves your transaction was valid is now (oversimplifying here) just a boolean check instead of running a hash algo over and over

I think a better way to say it is that it moves from a trustless system to a system that trusts based on some criteria. That criteria is usually how many coins one has. Since the original bitcoin concept was solving the byzantine generals problem, the entire point of all the cryptographic work was to be trustless. If you are cool with trust, you can have reversibility, lost password retrieval, anti-money laundering c…

Both Proof of Work and Ethereum's variant of Proof of Stake are based on automated consensus through cryptoeconomic incentives, not trust.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#204

Post by fsewe20 »

koheripbal wrote: post #145
zilebune wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think with Eth2 we're possibly seeing a the first attempt to address the Innovator's Dilemma[0] in the blockchain environment. I've been following the Eth2 progress for a few months now and from the outside it really feels like trying to swap out the engine of a running racecar. Definitely worth to follow how the Eth1->Eth2 evolution will play out, but I wonder if is not too late for Ethereum while newer kids on th…

I find it difficult to find a source of highly technical news on new cryptos. Any suggestions?

https://ethresear.ch/ is probably the best place for technical discussion.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#205

Post by grubles »

Ethereum just had a consensus failure that caused a loss of money and shut down transfers at one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world (Binance).

The minimum deposit for ETH2 is a very small percentage of the total premined (i.e. out of thin air) ETH that insiders were beneficiaries of. Take this event with a grain of salt, even the creator of Ethereum says the meat and bones of ETH2 is still years away.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#206

Post by nwah1 »

pkulak wrote: post #196
nwah1 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better way to say it is that it moves from a trustless system to a system that trusts based on some criteria. That criteria is usually how many coins one has. Since the original bitcoin concept was solving the byzantine generals problem, the entire point of all the cryptographic work was to be trustless. If you are cool with trust, you can have reversibility, lost password retrieval, anti-money laundering c…

I guess I don't understand how proof of stake uses trust while proof of work doesn't. They seem very similar to me. I could argue that with Bitcoin you have to trust all of these large pools that are constantly flirting with 50% of the hashing power.

That is a good point. Although, in principle Proof of Stake could use any number of algorithms, and thus the trust could be based on something other than who has the most resources. In general for distributed systems, trusting based on reputation is a common idea. "Circles of trust" was how the original Ripple concept was explained.

The important question is not which of these ideas is better than each other, but which is better than existing infrastructure.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#207

Post by skybrian »

drcode wrote: post #2

TLDR; The transition from Eth1->Eth2 requires the following steps: 1. Network operators (stakers) deposit at least 524,288 ETH in a special contract 2. The early Eth2 blockchain (the "beacon chain") launches Dec 1st 3. The Eth1 blockchain will be merged into Eth2 (details TBD) 4. Other features will be added to make Eth2 fully functional (sharding being the biggest feature) Just a few minutes ago, step 1 has been acc…

Does anything change about the “dark forest” problem?

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#208

Post by latchkey »

dmos62 wrote: post #78
brazzy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proof-of-work incentivizes cheap & renewable energy investment. Cheap yes, renewable no. Complete non sequitur there. > The endgame is that all energy companies will primarily be Bitcoin mining companies, feeding their excess renewable energy into the grid to power homes, etc. Absolute insanity straight out of postapocalyptic SF. "The ancients destroyed their civilization by funelling an ever increasing share of re…

>> Proof-of-work incentivizes cheap & renewable energy investment. > Cheap yes, renewable no. Complete non sequitur there. That's the main point. There's no inherent incentive to use clean energy for mining. There's opposite stories about obsolete aluminum plants staying alive in China by just using their energy allocations to mine Bitcoin.

Large scale (>2MW++) (ethereum) miner here.

We use hydropower because it is clean and cheap. Those are the incentives.

The aluminum plants shut down... not stay running. Both mining and plants use huge amounts of continuous power. Bitcoin mining is far more profitable... no need to keep the aluminum going.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#209

Post by notahacker »

dmantis wrote: post #201
pclmulqdq wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: Who suffers at the hands of Mastercard?

Well, not directly the mastercard, but current banking system - lots of people. TLDR; custody banking model keeps people out of control of their own property. There is a big problem with private property rights and safety guaranties of your capital today in most of the world. There are three problems: unstable govs in 3rd world countries, capital moving restrictions and QEs. I'm, for example, not from developed count…

Bitcoin lost more purchasing power between midnight and midday on Sunday than the USD did during the unprecedented QE stimuluses of 2009-2011. So either QE isn't actually that bad, or BTC is far too far from being a solution to be worth spending the entire energy requirements of a largish developing country or small developed country on.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#210

Post by dgrin91 »

nwah1 wrote: post #190
dgrin91 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means orders of magnitude less. The part of the blockchain that proves your transaction was valid is now (oversimplifying here) just a boolean check instead of running a hash algo over and over

I think a better way to say it is that it moves from a trustless system to a system that trusts based on some criteria. That criteria is usually how many coins one has. Since the original bitcoin concept was solving the byzantine generals problem, the entire point of all the cryptographic work was to be trustless. If you are cool with trust, you can have reversibility, lost password retrieval, anti-money laundering c…

How is the 'criteria' for PoW not how many ASICs/how cheap electricity is? I don't agree with your distinction.
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